


the shadow below

by loveinadoorway



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-04
Updated: 2011-10-04
Packaged: 2017-10-24 07:48:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/260849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveinadoorway/pseuds/loveinadoorway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Title: the shadow below<br/>Paring: Steve/Danny<br/>Genre: slash, h/c<br/>Rating: NC-17<br/>Word count: 1521<br/>Warnings: violence, drinking, sex (dub con), a silly happy ending<br/>Spoilers: 2.02<br/>Disclaimers: Just borrowed. Borrowed with love.<br/>Summary: There comes a moment, when all pretense ends and the shadow refuses to stay safely below the calm surface. Just something that has been bugging me a bit... Too calm on the surface?</p>
            </blockquote>





	the shadow below

Steve wasn’t drunk just yet, but he sure as hell was getting there fast.  
After a couple of days of pretending nothing ever happened, he was unraveling - and unraveling at top speed at that.

He hadn’t slept since he had broken out of jail, had hardly eaten. Some part of him seemed to be still running, hiding, plotting. Some other part of him was somehow still cowering in his dark, dank cell, some part was still fighting brutally in the shower, in the hall or in the yard. Physically, the wound Hesse had given him was the only wound he had received, but he knew enough about trauma to understand he was heading down a road that should scare him. That it didn’t scare him only meant he was even more fucked up than he’d admit even to himself.

In spite of everything, he had immediately taken charge of his team, acting calm and controlled when in fact he was neither of those things. His training and the rigid self-control he had learned with the SEALS kept him going when on the inside he was crumbling like a sand castle in the midday heat.

He kept it all behind walls, shoved it down into the shadow, out of sight.  
Compartmentalization – a specialty of his. He functioned just as he should and if the fact that he didn’t even take ONE day off to give the wound in his abdomen time to heal at least a little bit was an indicator that something was badly amiss, nobody seemed to notice. Not even Danny. Especially not Danny?

As Steve was nursing his howevermanieth shot of rotgut whiskey, he briefly wondered if he had gone to this hellhole of a place hoping for trouble or because he didn’t want anyone he knew to stumble over him dead drunk in one of his usual watering holes.  
Whichever way it was, trouble had just found him, or so his spider sense was telling him. He raised his head to look into the mirror over the bar and saw a big bruiser approach him from behind.

“Hey, pretty boy, wanna have some fun?”

The first thing Danny saw as he stormed into HPD’s holding cell area was the blood on Steve’s white t-shirt. He could taste bile for a moment, then got close enough to see that, in all likelihood, none of it was Steve’s. In fact, there was neither a scratch nor a visible bruise on the man, but judging from his bloodshot eyes, there seemed to be plenty of booze inside of him. Which MIGHT explain why he had been locked up after a bar fight in the seediest part of the harbor area.

Danny herded the eerily silent McGarrett to the car, drove him home – in silence –, followed him – again in complete silence – to the house and into the kitchen, but when the man proceeded to walk up the stairs to the bedroom without a word, something inside of Danny snapped.

“What the HELL makes you think you can pull a stunt like that and just the fuck walk upstairs to your bedroom, completely ignoring me, as if nothing happened?”

Steve continued up the stairs.

“THE FUCK, MCGARRETT???” Danny yelled, angrier than he had ever been in his life – and boy had he been angry some!

Steve acted as if he didn’t hear him, so Danny ran up the stairs after the man, barreled into him just as Steve reached the top and knocked the other man down by a combination of the law of physics and way too much rage. In a second, Danny was back on his feet, using his advantages (knowing he was going to slam into Steve and being stone cold sober) to pull the man up in a bruising policeman’s grip.  
Danny was panting as he slammed Steve into the wall hard enough to knock some bits of plaster loose.

“The fuck, McGarrett?” he repeated, searching Steve’s face for some clues.

The contraction of the man’s pupils was all the warning he got before he found himself roughly shoved into the bedroom and onto the bed. Still no sound from McGarrett as he threw himself on top of Danny and roughly kissed the shorter man, forcing entry, tongue-fucking Danny’s mouth hard and with way too much pressure to be pleasant.

Danny just lay there in stunned disbelief, as Steve ripped the shirt clean from Danny’s body and proceeded to bite down hard on Danny’s nipple. He opened his mouth to protest, but Steve blocked it with his hand.

Steve felt nothing. The shadow had swallowed him whole. He had felt nothing when Kono had lost her badge, nothing when Jenna had left, nothing when they gave him a babysitter and nothing when Danny told him about Rachel. Nothing at all.

He felt nothing as his teeth grazed Danny’s nipples, nothing as he stripped the man down, nothing as he shoved into the man’s ass, tighter than hell in spite of the lube. It didn’t matter that Danny was squirming under him, that there were pained gasps and that his nails left red streaks on Danny’s bronzed back.

But then, as he got closer to the void with every merciless shove, it happened.

“Steven?”

His name, just his name, nothing more. The anguished, soft, questioning tone. Finally, suddenly, there it was. The battering ram that tore down all the walls, let the proverbial dogs out, flooded him with feelings when before there had been only cold darkness.

Steve collapsed on Danny’s back like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Painful, wrecking sobs were breaking out of his chest. It felt like someone was hacking his way out of his chest with the help of a broken bottle and a murderous rage. He was going to pieces and nothing could stop it from happening.

“Danny…” he whispered, “Danny, I… I can’t do this anymore.” Tears were running down his face and he simply let them.

“What do you mean, Steve?” Danny asked. He tried to sound calm for Steve’s sake, but in actual fact, he was beyond shocked. He’d be hard pressed to say by what, though, the assault or the way Steve was breaking down now.

“Acting like everything’s okay when it’s not,” came the muffled answer. Steve had buried his face in the nape of Danny’s neck. “I’m so beyond fucked up, Danny. Oh God, please… Danny… I’m SO FUCKED UP!”

“I get that, McGarrett. It would, however, make this discussion a whole lot easier if you could get your humungous carcass OFF ME!” Danny wheezed, finding it kind of hard to gather enough breath to launch a first class rant at the insufferable man. And a rant it probably had to be, because mollycoddling was not going to cut it with SuperSEAL. Or maybe… hmmm…

“And seriously, babe, you could’ve just asked, you know, if you really wanted to fuck me,” he added, while there was still enough air around for a parting shot.

McGarrett rolled off him.  
The ‘babe’ had somehow been enough to stop the panic that threatened to choke Steve to death. He had sat in this house, night after night, sleepless, unable to turn off the lights because his entire world began to collapse the moment the room went dark.

There was so much raw emotion on Steve’s face that Danny almost panicked. Knowing that nothing would be gained if he went apeshit now, too, he just sighed and put his arms around the man he should not love, but did.  
So much so that he actually couldn’t care less about Rachel anymore. If only he had realized that BEFORE McGarrett had pulled that stupid stunt and gone to the Governor’s house. If only he hadn’t been so goddamned scared of the consequences.

He took a deep breath and whispered into Steve’s ear: “I love you, you stupid oaf. And I know that doesn’t make everything okay again, but I do and I need you to know.”

Steve pulled back enough so he could look in Danny’s face, all scrunched up and earnest and stupidly sweet with his silly hair all mussed up.

“Actually, no, it won’t make EVERYTHING okay, but… a whole lot it does seem to fix,” Steve said, with a smile that probably looked just as painful as it felt.

“Danny, I’m sorry, I… had no right… I couldn’t… shouldn’t…” Good God, how pathetic was that? And how the hell did one apologize for almost raping the man one loved to distraction?

“Can it, McGarrett. I’ll just put that on the long list of transgressions that I pretend did never happen. Like the time you shot that guy in the leg to get the location of that little girl they abducted, or the time you tossed that fucker off a dock, or the Italian chef whose head you stuffed in the pizza oven, or…”

Only one thing could stop what was rapidly lining up to be one of Danny’s lengthier rants. So Steve sighed, rolled them over and did what he had to do.

He kissed Danno senseless.


End file.
